Posterous’ Unfortunate Problem With Its Posterior

Today I became aware of a very unfortunate branding issue with a new social media platform called Posterous (pronounced Post-Er-Us). First of all, you should know that Posterous is a killer application that I have little doubt will soon be a leading social media property; I will have a follow-up post outlining the reasons. Now onto a sad yet humorous (IMO) lesson in branding; Posterous appears to be commonly misspelled (and even mispronounced) as Posterious (Post-Ear-E-Us).

Why is this mispronunciation/misspelling a problem? Well first of all the creators of Posterous seem not to have considered the misspelling from the beginning because they do not own Posterious.com. Second of all, doesn’t Posterious sound a whole lot like, well, a variation of posterior? I don’t know about you but I don’t think I would ever want my startup even remotely associated with, er, the posterior of anything.

Posterous is going to have a hell of a branding problem with people not pronouncing their name correctly (although in their defence they shouldn’t be having a problem). So what now? If you were in this same situation what should you do? Well, I am thinking whoever owns www.Posterious.com is getting some darned decent traffic and can expect to be propositioned by the Posterous team for a buyout; if it hasn’t already. If not, well, Posterous will have to wait until it is popular enough that the majority of users do not make that spelling mistake; I am relatively sure the company is going to be very successful so there is a good chance that will happen. Another option is to perhaps place the phonetics of their name below their logo in central areas of their site – not pretty but effective.

To avoid this from ever having happened Posterous should have consulted Jim Hedger because I guarantee you he would have kiboshed that name right away after a giggle or two (if you know Jim you know I am right!). You see once when Jim was my employee at StepForth, he and I were occasionally in the position of helping clients determine business names while planning marketing strategies. Well, I tell you, during those brainstorming sessions where he and I tried to think of names there were many quashed ideas because the word(s) sounded too close to something completely inappropriate; we had good laughs but we always came up with a great name in the end.

So if you are going to pick a name for your company/website consider this far from exhaustive list of rules and apply each rule if possible:

Choose a name that is not easily misspelled.

Every domain can be misspelled so be sure to secure the misspellings of the domain before launching the site. This is because if your site is a hit it will be more costly to secure the misspellings if someone is using/squatting them.

Make certain the name you choose does not have a completely horrific translation in another language – unless that market means nothing to you and you don’t mind a little ribbing from the press when the news gets out.

Consider designing the logo to make the phonetics of the business/website name more obvious. In the case of Posterous, they used what appears to be a post-it note of sorts as a part of their logo. Unfortunately, I find the usage of the post-it far too subtle. Perhaps a dog-eared or raised corner with shadowing would help drive the point home?

All I know is I wouldn’t want to be in the shoes of the marketer who has to constantly correct people’s pronunciation. Oh and I pray Posterious isn’t purchased by Clusty; although I suppose that would be yet another great gift from God to the comedians of the world.